India’s love affair with AI

I recently met a remarkable, ambitious, 28-year-old through a consulting project. During the course of us working together, the conversation turned to AI, the 2026 equivalent of talking about the weather. I asked her about her AI usage, habits, views and I found her answer very telling. She told me with a straightforward expression and no hint of irony, that her chosen AI has become, over the course of a year, her closest confidant.

She tells her chatbot things she would never tell her parents, her friends or perhaps even herself. The chatbot listens. It does not interrupt. It does not tell her she is overreacting. It does not compare her situation to a cousin’s, offer unsolicited advice, loudly exclaim about what the neighbours will think, or turn her vulnerability into a future argument. To her, it simply responds with patience, curiosity and apparent understanding.

She’s exceptionally aware that she’s talking to a machine, and the reason she reaches for it, she says, is not exactly loneliness. It is relief. She said “Finally I feel like no one is judging me and that’s all I really want”

That conversation with her got me thinking this relief is particularly intoxicating within India’s unique social contract.

57% of young Indians use AI for emotional support and a staggering 88% of school students use it compared to a global average of 20%. And 42% of those surveyed said they are less likely to talk to friends or family since they use AI for their emotional needs.

Part of this is structural. Nuclear families, migration for better professional prospects, our endless hamster-on-a-wheel schedules and the overwhelming pace of urban living mean that many of the informal emotional safety nets that once existed simply aren’t there anymore. So, while we romanticize the good ol days, it’s worth peeking behind the curtain of what India’s social and emotional infrastructure has demanded of us.

The Indian social contract has always contained a strange bargain. You will never be abandoned, but you will never be left alone.

For centuries, belonging in India came wrapped in networks of family, community, neighbourhood and obligation. The village, whether literal or metaphorical, was never simply a place. It was an operating system. It provided support, protection, identity and continuity. It ensured that someone would show up when there was a wedding to organise, a business to build, a child to raise or a funeral to attend.

But belonging came with conditions.

The same system that protected you also mistook surveillance for care. It monitored your choices, evaluated your decisions and ranked your successes and failures. It knew who you married, how much you earned, when you had children, what you weighed, where you lived and what everyone else thought about it. “Log kya kahenge?” (What will people say?) is an invisible, omnipresent layer of social control.

In turn, we are trained from childhood to curate our thoughts, censor our desires, and which parts of ourselves are safe to show and which parts are better kept hidden. We often speak about loneliness as if it is the absence of people. Many Indians know a different kind of loneliness entirely. The loneliness of being surrounded where visibility is abundant but understanding is scarce.

For a long time, we accepted this as the price of belonging.

Then technology offered an escape.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has spent decades studying what technology does to human attachment. Her central argument is that social media came for our attention, but artificial intelligence is coming for something far more intimate: our capacity for attachment itself. She calls it “artificial intimacy” the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, and the feeling of closeness without the hard work of actual relationship.

The seduction, of course, is that it feels like care. For many young Indians, it is the anti-village. All the comfort of being heard. None of the weight of being ranked.

The AI requires nothing back. It does not gossip. It does not hold your past against you. It will not carry the conversation to judgy relatives. It is, by design, frictionless. And for anyone whose experience of belonging has involved judgment, comparison or scrutiny, frictionless is an extraordinarily seductive offer.

But real human relationships are messy. They are fragile, sometimes frustrating, and they require us to compromise, risk being hurt, and show up for someone else even when we don’t feel like it. When we swap that complex human reality for a perfectly programmed echo chamber, we aren’t actually curing our loneliness. We are soothing it. And what remains is not connection itself but a very convincing impression of it.

The irony is that AI may be thriving in India not despite our culture, but because of some of its deepest instincts.

For generations, family came with opinions. Community came with expectations. Care came bundled with commentary. We complained about it constantly, but we accepted the bargain because the alternative was isolation. Now, for the first time, technology is offering a third option: belonging without judgment.

We built a social contract so demanding of performance and so short on unconditional acceptance that an entire generation went looking for its opposite and found it in a machine.

The 28-year-old I know was not asking for much. Just to be heard without being assessed. That is not a radical request. It is the most human one there is. The sadness is not that she found it in a chatbot. It is that for so many Indians, a chatbot was the first place they thought to look.

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